Road show set to highlight benefits of terminal services architecture

Industrial automation expert HardwarePT and ACP, the American firm behind the client and terminal server management product ThinManager®, will be jointly running a series of free road shows across the UK in May, 2012. Interested parties can book a place at the road shows here.

ThinManager enables an industrial application to be deployed using standard terminal servers and thin client terminal hardware, giving users the applications and tools to reduce both management and hardware costs while at the same time increasing the overall security of their architecture.

The ThinManager road show is intended to educate production and operations management, senior engineering staff, system integrators and continuous improvement specialists about the benefits of centrally managed terminal services architecture.

HardwarePT, which is a division of SolutionsPT, believes that the UK is witnessing significant growth in the deployment of terminal services based industrial solutions.

“The benefits and return on investment of terminal services are compelling,” explains Rob Dinsmore, the SolutionsPT Product Manager responsible for the ACP portfolio. “It’s about ease of management, ease of security and ease of maintenance. It improves the total cost of ownership, performance and function of the plant.”

As well as an overview of the benefits of terminal services, attendees at the road show will have the opportunity to see some of the benefits of ThinManager for themselves.

“This is see-it to believe-it technology,” said Keith Jones, ACP’s International Sales Manager. “There are many facets to ThinManager, and it’s impossible to instantly visualise all the benefits a typical automation application can expect to realise by implementing a typical solution. However, when people actually see it in action, it begins to become real for them.”

ThinManager ensures that the applications which are most important to operations and production personnel are securely available to them whenever they need them to be. It ensures that this goal is achieved, even when systems fail. For example, its wizard based configuration of failover means that any industrial application can be instantly made to be tolerant of one, or more, systems failures. In addition, inherent architectural features enhance both system and user security.

Although thin clients are generally more reliable than PCs, any device can fail. At the road show, ACP will demonstrate a ‘sixty second replacement’, when a damaged thin client is replaced with a new one in less than a minute. There’s hardly any operations downtime, and since the application is able to continue running without the client; there’s no loss of process data or control.

The road shows will also demonstrate WinTMC, which allows any terminal, even a regular industrial PC, to be used within a terminal services environment. This allows companies to switch to terminal services with a lower capital investment in the short term.

Other functions on display will be the ability of ThinManager Mobile to interface with portable devices such as an iPads or iPhones and ThinManager iTMC, which turns the iPad itself into a full blown thin client. This allows the user to run a HMI session or access a terminal server from the device.

The road shows will visit Manchester United’s football stadium, Old Trafford, on May 11, The Williams F1 Conference Centre in Oxford on May 15, The Marriot Hotel in Peterborough on May 16, The Holiday Inn in Darlington on May 17, Macdonald Houstoun House in Livingston on May 18, Rochestown Park Hotel in Cork on May 22 and the City West Hotel in Dublin on May 23.